“Give ’m hell, Laban,” he encouraged.  “Them’s my sentiments.”

And as our train rolled on I continued to look back at Laban, standing in his stirrups by the baby’s grave.  Truly he was a weird figure, with his long hair, his moccasins, and fringed leggings.  So old and weather-beaten was his buckskin shirt that ragged filaments, here and there, showed where proud fringes once had been.  He was a man of flying tatters.  I remember, at his waist, dangled dirty tufts of hair that, far back in the journey, after a shower of rain, were wont to show glossy black.  These I knew were Indian scalps, and the sight of them always thrilled me.

“It will do him good,” father commended, more to himself than to me.  “I’ve been looking for days for him to blow up.”

“I wish he’d go back and take a couple of scalps,” I volunteered.

My father regarded me quizzically.

“Don’t like the Mormons, eh, son?”

I shook my head and felt myself swelling with the inarticulate hate that possessed me.

“When I grow up,” I said, after a minute, “I’m goin’ gunning for them.”

“You, Jesse!” came my mother’s voice from inside the wagon.  “Shut your mouth instanter.”  And to my father:  “You ought to be ashamed letting the boy talk on like that.”

Two days’ journey brought us to Mountain Meadows, and here, well beyond the last settlement, for the first time we did not form the wagon-circle.  The wagons were roughly in a circle, but there were many gaps, and the wheels were not chained.  Preparations were made to stop a week.  The cattle must be rested for the real desert, though this was desert enough in all seeming.  The same low hills of sand were about us, but sparsely covered with scrub brush.  The flat was sandy, but there was some grass—­more than we had encountered in many days.  Not more than a hundred feet from camp was a weak spring that barely supplied human needs.  But farther along the bottom various other weak springs emerged from the hillsides, and it was at these that the cattle watered.

We made camp early that day, and, because of the programme to stay a week, there was a general overhauling of soiled clothes by the women, who planned to start washing on the morrow.  Everybody worked till nightfall.  While some of the men mended harness others repaired the frames and ironwork of the wagons.  Them was much heating and hammering of iron and tightening of bolts and nuts.  And I remember coming upon Laban, sitting cross-legged in the shade of a wagon and sewing away till nightfall on a new pair of moccasins.  He was the only man in our train who wore moccasins and buckskin, and I have an impression that he had not belonged to our company when it left Arkansas.  Also, he had neither wife, nor family, nor wagon of his own.  All he possessed was his horse, his rifle, the clothes he stood up in, and a couple of blankets that were hauled in the Mason wagon.